OF LIGHTS & FOLDS

• Published in: Art in America (1939) Vol. 109; no. 4; p. 46
• Main Author: Ives, Lucy
• Format: Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Brant Publications, Incorporated 01-07-2021
• Subjects: Adnan, Etel; American culture; Art exhibits; Autobiographies; Contemporary art; Light; Visual artists; Ottoman Empire
• ISSN: 0004-3214

Etel Adnan's contributions to the 2015 Istanbul Biennale was an artist's book titled Family Memoirs on the End of the Ottoman Empire. This accordion-fold work contains the artist's handwritten recollections, in Turkish and English, concerning her family and the catastrophic conflicts of the decade before her birth in 1925. As the text mentions politically sensitive material - social ties between Turkish and Armenian families before the 1915-17 Armenian-Assyrian-Greek Genocide -what had originally been foreseen as an accompanying wall text was shrunk down to a more discreet card one could read while viewing the turning of the pages. At the Biennale, a white-gloved assistant seated at a table silently lifted, displayed, and shifted the pages for visitors. Family Memoirs on the End of the Ottoman Empire is but one example of Adnan's sensitivity to the ways in which people look, read, and remember-a sensitivity that inflects her larger hybrid art-and-writing practice.